Aaron Thier releases paperback edition of his 2016 cli-fi novel MR ETERNITY

Aaron Thier is a 30-something writer born and bred in western
Massachusetts, and his latest hardback novel "Mr. Eternity" has just been issued in paperback.

A comic novel and a very serious novel at the same time, and it has been characterized by readers as literary fiction, sci-fi, apocalyptic dystopian, fantasy and cli-fi. And a comic novel, as well.

Thier did his undergraduate work at
Yale, majoring in literature (Class of 2006) and later completed a
Creative Writing MFA at the University of Florida in 2012.

His surname has an interesting back story, and when asked about it,
he told me a bit of family history.

"Their is my birth surname," he said. "My parents decided that Thier was more interesting than Murphy [his father Peter Murphy is an English at Williams College."

"So the three children all have my mom's
name. This hasn't produced as much confusion as you might think.
People seem charmed by the matriarchal orientation."

In addition, in connection with his mother's surname, a former
president of Brandeis University in the early 1990s was her father,
his grandfather, Dr Samuel Thier, a medical doctor.

"I wish I knew more about where the Thier name came from. I know that the original Samuel Thier, my great-great-grandfather, was an actor in the Yiddish theater in Warsaw, Poland, but I don't know much else about him."

When asked if he was a pessimist or an optimist in regard to possible
climate change outcomes in the future, he said: "I’m a pessimist in
the sense that I don’t think we’ll get it together to avoid a very bad outcome. In many important ways we’ve already missed the
boat by a long way."

However, he added: "But I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe in
human resourcefulness. I don’t think this represents a threat to human
existence, only a threat to human civilization as it’s currently
configured. People will eke out a living somehow in a brutalized world.
There will probably be fewer of us, maybe way fewer."

A recent interview with Thier in the Chicago Review of Books updates the paperback edition of his novel and his views about global warming.